The Barsoom Project

The city’s skyline was jagged with crystal spires too thin to support themselves, that should have vibrated and shattered in the wind, and spans between towers that twisted like facets of a gem, viewed through the center of that perfect stone: the angles were there, the angles could be perceived, but not understood. They didn’t make any sense.

Max and Orson helped each other down from one of the higher shelves; and looked at it in astonishment. “Like something out of an Escher painting,” Max muttered.

Orson, for once, just shook his head, then looked around for the skinny redhead. “Kevin? What have we got here?”

Kevin sighed. “Mythologically, I haven’t the foggiest fuck of a notion. Effects-wise, I think it’s a modified three-dimensional holographic binary decomposition of a Mandelbrot set.”

“Kevin?” Orson said.

“Yeah?”

“Get a life, would you?”

The other Adventurers had collected around them by now, gazing up at the impossible reality. “What is this?” Yarnall whispered. “Anybody read about anything like this in Eskimo lore?”

There was no direct answer, but Kevin looked at the vast crystal forest of buildings and shook his head slowly. “Damned if it doesn’t remind me of something, but I can’t remember what.”

“Eskimos…” Orson said. “But does it specifically have to be Eskimo mythology, or could it include mythology about Eskimos?”

Trianna pulled her collar tighter. “Why? What’s the difference?”

“I remember something from Lovecraft about a tribe of degenerate Eskimos who worshiped… worshiped… I’m sorry. It just won’t come.”

Cautiously, they began to move forward.

The ground, although uneven, had better traction here. The maze was only about three hundred meters away. The avenues between the blocks were slick with ocean damp, freezing dry, a glare of ice forming over everything even as they watched.

Frankish Oliver was the first to step onto the new ground. He tested it with one foot, then looked back at them, and nodded his head in a sickly approval. “Let’s do it,” he said, thumping his war club against the ground. He might have been trying to convince himself that the street wouldn’t collapse under him.

Max leaned close to Eviane. “This is weird,” he whispered. “Long time ago I saw a movie. Made in about 1910. Silent, black and white, flatfilm. Name of Nosferatu. None of the angles looked right. Everything looked wrong. This is like that, only worse.”

“Worse?”

He rubbed at his eyes. “Yeah. Not only can’t these angles work to hold buildings up, they shouldn’t even be angles.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Neither does what I’m seeing.”

Snow Goose shushed them and pushed them back into the shadows. “Look!”

Something came shambling by. Mercifully, it passed at a distance: an enormous black shape, an impossible cross between an ape and a spider, with long, hairy arms and the gait of a man who has had his limbs broken repeatedly and set at weird angles… and then can still move, with a strange and fluid coordination that set Eviane’s hindbrain aflame with panic.

From past or future, she remembered this thing. With a dull, heavy certainty, she knew that some of her friends were going to die. The world began to darken, and the breath came hard in her throat. For a moment she lost it completely, and didn’t know where she was until Max was suddenly shaking her shoulders.

“Eviane? Are you-”

Charlene and Hippogryph and the others were looking at her with alarm.

“I’m all right.”

Snow Goose and Oliver examined her carefully, comforting her. Oliver consulted some sort of a monitoring device strapped to his wrist. Strange, she had never seen it before. He peered fixedly into her eyes. “Were you… ah, having visions?”

“Maybe. That monster. It’s called… an Amartoq, isn’t it?”

Oliver gave Snow Goose a sidelong glance, said something that Eviane couldn’t hear. “Yes,” Snow Goose said. “I was just about to tell you that.”

“And if you get scratched by its nails, you die?”

Snow Goose nodded.

Eviane reached out for Robin Bowles and hugged him, gripped at his arm with pitiful strength. “Don’t! Don’t go in there! You’ll be murdered. Worse.”

He pulled back. “What…”

And she turned back to Snow Goose. “And you. You’re going to be killed by things. Things with no heads.”

Snow Goose took a moment to collect herself, and then spoke calmly. “Eviane. We have to go forward. There are things to do, things to learn. If we have to face monsters, then that’s the biz.” She smiled wistfully. “I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be back in the dorm eating pizza. But we have an ace. We have you, and you can see things. And you’ll tell us what you see, won’t you.”

It wasn’t a question.

Eviane nodded, numbly. She turned her head into Max’s arms, and sobbed.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

SECOND THOUGHTS

By now, Max was totally confused.

The woman he held in his arms wasn’t the warrior, or even the passionate creature it had been his pleasure to discover last night. It was someone new, almost a different personality, motivated now by a balance of knowledge and blind fear.